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Timaru Herald, Volume LX, Issue 2262, 7 December 1896, Page 2

Mr Hall-Jones, at his meeting last Thursday night, made a savage attack upon Mr J. S. Keith, charging Mr Keith, on the evidence of a newspaper report, with having! wilfully misrepresented him by misquoting Hansard against him, and otherwise. Mr Keith replied by producing the extracts which he had read, and explained other charges m an equally satisfactory manner, so that Mr Hall-Jones was constrained to withdraw the charges against Mr Keith. He, however, turned round on the Herald reporter, and charged him with having altered Mr Keith's quotations out of malice and bad feeling. ; Our reporter protested against the charge on the spot, and it is necessary to say a little more about it now, as the question of the fairness of its reports is an important one to any newspaper. The quotations which our reporter was charged with having maliciously mangled were as follow:—(1) "It seems almost a waste of time to go into the finances, seeing that they have been dealt with by some of the ablest financiers of the House. But it seems to me we have actually no surplus at all. If we take the actual departmental earnings for the year, and compare them with the actual departmental expenditure, I fail to see that we have a surplus at aIL On the contrary we find a deficiency of about .£230,000. This deficiency, of course, disappears when we take into account the amount carried forward from the previous year, and the amount borrowed on account of the accretion of sinking fund. The position this year is worse than that of last year, because the amount carried forward is something like £110,000 short of that brought forward last year." (2) v I would like to see what the Government have done for the working classes and the unemployed." The first of these quotions was shortened m our report as follows : —" It seems to me that we have no surplus at all. . . On the contrary we have a deficiency oij about £230,000." The second was altered from the oblique to the direct form : —" The Government have* done nothing for the working classes and the unemployed." Perhaps it would have been better if the reporter had not used quotation marks m either case. In the | first instance the full quotation was not given, but it was plainly indicated by points that some words were -omitted- frdm the middle of the.matter quoted. That was the omission which Mr Hall-Jones chiefly complained of. In fche second case the form was inadvertently varied, but' the sense remained precisely the same —an expression of opinion by the speaker. In both cases the report expressed what Mr Keith intended to convey, because he was contrasting, m the one case, Mr Hall-Jones' earlier assertion that there was no surplus, with his later one that there had been a surplus every year ; arid, m the other case, Mr Hall-Jones' complaint as a private member m 1895, with what he said as a Minister to a deputation of unemployed, whom he told that the Government were doing, and had been doing, all that they could for the unemployed. It is quite clear that Mr Hall-Jones was not justified m charging our reporter with malice and bad feeling. T^here is only one other point m Mr HallJonas' speech to which we shall allude, and our comment shall he very brief. He evidently felt keenly the force of certain leading articles m the Herald which had attacked his political action as a public man.

i ■ — — — — Mr Hall-Jones' method of reply was * i to make a series of spiteful personal ; remarks against the presumed j ! writer of those articles. A man < who adopts that line of defence < puts himself entirely m the wrong, besides raising the supposition that he has no good answer to what has been said against his political conduct, i